Blood and Salt (42 page)

Taras feels a bit of warmth in his belly. For once a hand goes to the prisoners.

In the tent Oleksa and his friends, looking bored to death, play one more trick. Then Oleksa looks at Kyrylo and nods. They throw down their cards and go out to look, along with their buddies.
Taras and his friends follow.

The smoke thickens and the fire roars. Outside the fence guards run around the fire, blankets flapping, but after a while they just watch. There’s not a lot left to burn and snow cover will contain the fire.

Internees stand along the fence. Already the jail has lost the look of a building. Logs wrapped in fire sag at new angles. A plume of smoke rises high overhead and sparks spit at the guards. It must be warm by the fire.

Thank God there was no one in the hoosegow.

At last the roaring fades and the fire dies to glowing stumps. Prisoners drift to their tents. Leaving sentries to watch overnight, guards straggle back to their tents, as the commandant slips out of the compound for a look.

“Son of a bitch burned real hot. Like a big goddamn bonfire.”

“Good way to say goodbye to this stinking place.”

“Goddamn stinking place.”

“God, I need a drink.”

The guards probably have whiskey. Whiskey would be nice now. Or potato wine.

Taras and his friends go back to the tent. The cards are still on the ground. Oleksa and his friends haven’t come back. Their blankets are gone. Taras remembers Oleksa nodding to Kyrylo.

“What in hell?”
Yuriy says. “Nobody asked us.”

“Didn’t trust us,” Ihor says.

“Maybe they thought we weren’t ready to go,”
Tymko says.

“And maybe they’re right,”
Yuriy says. “I’m not, anyway.”

“Me either.”
Taras has known this for a long time.

“If I ever try to escape,” Ihor says, “I don’t want it to be this cold.”

This would be a good time to be asleep. To have missed the whole thing.

Next day the guards stop by the tent and discover men are missing. They get nothing out of Taras and his friends, who are apparently not even awake. Once awake, they swear they got bored watching the fire and came back to sleep. The guards tear across the camp like demented squirrels, looking for the captain in charge. They’ll have to go out and search, but there really aren’t enough of them and the escapees have about a ten-hour start.

The hoosegow smoulders as the prisoners take down the tents. Taras still feels pleased. Someone’s managed to strike back. He likes the fire even if it happened because of someone’s carelessness and the escaping men only took advantage of the situation.

No, it had to be Oleksa and the others. They were waiting for it. Since the prisoners have been eating in the commandant’s tent, they’ve been outside the fence in the evenings, with more chances to hide and start a fire. More stoves with live coals a man might conceal somehow. Oleksa knew as he played that last card game that it was just a matter of time until he heard the shouting and the flames.

That afternoon
they make the short train ride to Banff and are marched to the Cave and Basin camp. On the way through town Taras picks up a
Crag and Canyon
lying in the road. He and Tymko take turns looking at it as they walk. In an article about the “diminished number” of internees, he learns that the town of Banff no longer likes having the camp on its doorstep.
Apparently the town no longer “derives any pecuniary benefit from the interns.”
Tymko reminds him that everything seems to come down to profit. The story says that “the great majority of our citizens are of the opinion that the scenic outlook is not vastly improved by the presence of the slouching, bovine-faced foreigners.”

Taras is surprised such words still hurt. “You’d think we asked to come here.”

“Pah! Never mind,”
Tymko says. “They think they’re being sarcastic, but I could be way more sarcastic than that. They’re just a bunch of spoiled kids trying to be clever.”

This winter
Taras and his friends find themselves in a different bunkhouse. Most of the men are different than the ones from last winter, and there’s one big change for the better. Zmiya won’t be with them, watching Taras and his friends. Realizing this, Taras finds himself taking a deep breath, feels his shoulders relaxing.

Clearing snow
off the Banff streets a week later, Tymko finds another newspaper someone dropped. It says the “alien curs” have been making catcalls at local women while being marched through the town.
The commandant must take “strenuous measures,” it says, “otherwise some muscular Canadian will wade into the gang of foul-mouthed, leering Austrians and, armed with a club or some other persuasive weapon, teach the brutes a lesson they will not soon forget.”

Even
Tymko has little to say.
They decide not to show the story to anyone else.

“Why do they hate us?”
Taras asks.

“Why does one people ever hate another?” For the first time since Taras has known him, Tymko shows no interest in analysis.

Just before Christmas,
Myro grabs a copy of the
Crag and Canyon
that a guard left in the canteen.
A General Cruikshank has recently inspected the camp and some prisoners brought grievances to him.
“A number of the interns took advantage of the occasion to complain to the general that the guards were ungentle in handling the prisoners,” the newspaper says, and adds, “the majority of the foreign scum should be ‘gentled’ with a pick-axe handle.” Taras begins to wonder if people are leaving newspapers around on purpose for them to find.

The first weeks
of December are warmer than last year, which is good because winter coats haven’t come. Daytime temperatures are above freezing and water still runs in the Bow. But on Canadian Christmas Eve, it turns much colder. The men are brought back from work early and allowed to visit the canteen after supper.

Ihor stumbles into the bunkhouse that evening, his face a pasty grey.
Taras missed him at supper and wondered where he could be. He sits down on his bunk, shaking. Myro wraps a blanket around him and brings him a glass of water, all they have to offer.

Tymko gets the story out of him. He manages only a few words at a time, his body convulsed by dry retching.
A Romanian, George Luka Budak, thirty-five years old, was found under his bunk in the guardhouse in the middle of the afternoon. His throat was cut through the larynx and his stomach so badly slashed that his bowels spilled out. For once the guards managed to get a doctor quickly.

Private Bernie Woolf, a Jewish guard who speaks Romanian, was called to see if he could find out what happened. There was blood all over the floor and all over Budak.
A straight razor covered in blood lay on the floor. Budak couldn’t talk, but he could nod a little.
Woolf was supposed to find out what happened – ask Budak if he’d done it himself. Woolf thought maybe Budak had agreed with this, but he couldn’t be sure the man even knew what he was being asked.
Woolf knew that was what the brass wanted to hear, though. He said he thought Budak was probably saying it was suicide. By 4:20, Budak had gone into shock and died. Woolf had fled the building.

He ran into Ihor before supper. He needed to talk to somebody else who spoke Romanian. He told Ihor everything he’d seen. They both threw up in the trees near the bunkhouse. Melted snow in their mouths, swirled the water around and spat. Melted more and swallowed it.
They weren’t interested in supper.

Budak hadn’t been in the guardhouse as a punishment, though. He’d been staying there because he was afraid of some of
the other prisoners. “I never talked to him.” Ihor says. “Maybe he’d still be alive.”

Taras knew who Budak was, like everybody else. He knew the man was pushed around sometimes. Not by anybody in Taras’s bunkhouse, but sometimes you’d see a sudden movement in a clump of men, or hear a harsh shout. Now the man’s dead.

Why didn’t people like him? Because he was Romanian? Or because he always said there was no reason for him to be there? Because he wasn’t an Austrian citizen and so could not have been an “enemy alien.”

Of course, the Ukrainians never thought there was any reason for them to be there either.

Taras has asked Tymko why people in Banff would hate the Ukrainians. Now he wonders if anyone hated the Romanian enough to kill him.

He remembers passing the guardhouse in the
afternoon. Did he see someone outside the building? Someone who slipped back among the trees when he knew he’d been seen? Or is he imagining things because he knows the man is dead?

The official story is suicide, but suddenly no one feels safe.

On December 28,
a fine day just two degrees below freezing, six guards, caps in hand, carry the coffin of the Romanian Budak. Some walk very upright, others with heads slightly bowed. There is almost no snow on the ground, an oddity so late in December. Arthur Lake frames the scene in his camera’s lens.

He’s heard the stories about Budak’s death. Murder by guards. Murder by another prisoner. Suicide brought on by terror or insanity. Budak was beaten up by somebody a few weeks before he died, that much is certain. Spent his last days in the guardhouse because he was afraid that person – or those persons – would get to him again. Was last seen shaving with a straight razor, apparently upset and agitated. And found moments later tucked under his bed, gushing blood, stomach cut open, guts spilling onto the floor. If he was going to do that to himself, why did he bother to cut his own throat? For that matter, how could he do it?

No one will ever know the answer, unless the person or persons who may have attacked him talk about it. If he did it himself –
and Arthur has his doubts about this – they will never know what went through the man’s mind.

George Luka Budak is to be buried in the Banff cemetery.
Well away from the ordinary law-abiding citizens of Banff, the ones whose internal organs will remain in their cold bodies for all the years it takes for them to become dust.

The guards pass without noticing the camera.

That evening
in the soldiers’ mess, the guards talk about a new weapon in the war, the armoured fighting vehicle. Also called a landship, it runs on caterpillar tracks and has a heavy gun that can fire in many directions. The British Navy developed it after the Army wrote off the idea. It has the capacity to cross No Man’s Land and make it to the German trenches. It could mark a turning point in the wretched warfare that keeps men pinned in trenches, only to be slaughtered in their thousands – for little or no gain – every time an offensive is ordered. Sergeant Lake refrains from the obvious comment: there are worse places to be in this war than the Rocky Mountains.

Except if you were George Luka Budak.

CHAPTER 30

The violin

January, 1917

January continues
to be quite mild. On Ukrainian Christmas, January 8, the thermometer reads one degree above freezing. The prisoners don’t have to work, a change from last year. The dining hall has a tinselled Christmas tree. Green and red streamers loop across walls and dangle from the ceiling. The commandant approved the purchase of the streamers but this year the prisoners had to hang them. Not even Tymko can explain this, since it clearly takes away recreational pleasures from the guards. Still, Taras and his friends are glad not to be expected to work on what, for some unknown reason, the brass call Greek Christmas.

The dinner is better than average and the prisoners get their mail after the meal. Taras has a letter from his parents. So does Myro.
Tymko gets a card from someone he knew in the mine, Ihor from a friend in Pincher Creek.

Yuriy gets one from his wife. Taras happens to turn toward him as he opens it. A huge grin pulls at Yuriy’s face. He begins to cry –
still grinning like a madman.

“Yuriy?”
Taras asks. “Is everything all right?”

Yuriy sobs harder. His shirt collar is getting wet but he doesn’t notice. “Nadia...” he manages to say, but he chokes on the next words.

“Nadia...” he tries again. “Nadia...” He gives up on words, and with both hands makes a rounded shape over his belly.